Don’t Call Yourself a Radical. Be a Radical.

By Charles Beard

“Radical” has become something of a buzzword for Christians of all traditions and denominations.

It’s a wonderful word: it connotes the rebellion of the 1960s and the fun-loving cartoons of the 1980s.

I like the word radical because it gets to the heart of how different our lives have to be. We are Christians; we have seen the risen Lord. We have to love more, pray better, and be holier in response.

A second-century document called the Letter to Diognetus summarizes our radical calling:

With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, [Christians] follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in. … And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not their wives. They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law.

A radical life is a necessary corrective to the post-Christian secular mentality that sees spirituality as a comfort or as a way to be “basically a good person.”

If our Christian practice doesn’t look different from conventional morality, we’re doing it wrong.

As with any popular word or phrase, however, it’s easy for “radical” to begin to lose its meaning from overuse. I think we’re starting to see this as Christians with different or even contradictory perspectives appropriate the word for their own purposes.

“Liberal” Christians speak of radical inclusivity, which — near as I can tell — means roughly what secular people mean when they talk about regular inclusivity. “Conservative” Christians strive to be “radically countercultural,” which sometimes morphs into purposely sounding like a jerk to everyone who doesn’t agree with them.

Serious Christians of all traditions — I include myself here — use it to distinguish their lives from “regular” or “nominal” or even — God forbid — “cultural” Christians. It’s problematic to use radical in this context because it makes the word a comfort rather than a challenge. And it should always be a challenge.

We get called radical sometimes in our Catholic Worker community. It’s radical to let homeless people live in your home (though we don’t have any guests right now). And it’s radical to pass the hat to pay the back rent for someone whose first name I never quite got. (I still don’t know if it’s Clare or Clara.)

We all do good things like this, sometimes openly and sometimes secretly. If we are serious Christians it’s easy to pat ourselves on the back at what a good job we’re doing at living radical lives. Rather than letting our good deeds show forth God’s love, we let them turn into self-satisfaction and self-satisfaction into pride.

We cannot let that happen.

When Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin founded the Catholic Worker, “radical” pretty much meant Communist. It meant someone who wanted to turn the world — and the world’s morality — upside down with the people’s revolution. Maurin tried to reclaim the word. He used to say that the Latin word radix, from which radical derives, means “root.” To be radicals, for Maurin, means to return to the roots of who we are as Christians.

What are some of those things?

Jesus provides a primer in the Gospel:

You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you. … For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have? Do not the tax collectors do the same?And if you greet your brothers only, what is unusual about that? Do not the pagans do the same? So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:43-44, 46-47)

The questions we should ask ourselves are these: Who are my enemies, and how can I love them today? Who are my persecutors, and how can I pray for them today?

To do those two things, and to do them well (or even to do them badly) will be more radical than a thousand hospitality houses and free lunches.

Charles D. Beard and his wife Brielle are members of the St. Zita Catholic Worker Community of Green Country in Oklahoma. They have three children: Mychael (14), Benjamin (almost 12), and Tobias (2). Charles is a fifth generation Okie — which he is weirdly proud of — and has begun studies to become a permanent deacon — which Brielle is weirdly proud of.